Monday, July 13, 2015

#Wikidata - more great statistics

When you want to know what Wikidata data is about, you find it in the statements "instance of" and "subclass of". The illustration is part of a set of new statistics by Zolo. It concentrates on these instances and statistics and a big surprise is that there are still so many more items without one (32.6%). The statistics by Magnus show that only 19.07% of all items have no statement.

The great thing of the new statistics page is that it shows pie charts for many Wikipedias. English Wikipedia for instance for instance does not know about 1.5 million people Wikidata knows about. When you analyse this, you get into the domain of set theory. These people can already be subdivided in the following way:

people only en.wp knows about

people en.wp knows about as well as others

people en.wp does not know about but another wp does

people no Wikipedia knows about

items Wikidata does not recognise as people

People and unidentified items are half the pie for Wikidata. In all cases they are pretty well connected to articles in whatever project and provide a perfect opportunity to provide information. I blogged about it before, wikilinks and red links are obvious targets for links to other information not only for people but also for people.

Many people have #Babel information on their user page. They thereby indicate their proficiency in a language. When a Wikipedia does not have an article, why not provide an article in a known language? When there is no article why not provide at least the information that is available? It will help an editor write a new article, it will provide a reader with at least some information.

The point is that we should share in the sum of all available knowledge because we can.